The lost adventure of childhood

Also, a child without a mother is not as closely supervised and is more on his or her own. It's being forced to grow up too soon. And that's another persistent theme of yours: youth, or boyhood -- literally or figuratively ...

Overgrown boys.

Yes. Even in "Kavalier and Clay," one of them gets married, but the thing that they create, their art form, is for boys.

The idea of boys and boyhood is very strong in "Summerland," too. There's this bit about this defunct quasi-Boy Scout organization called the Braves of the Wa-He-Ta. There's this official tribe handbook that Jennifer T. is given, and it comes in handy.

It's so useful! I love that. It's this hokey scouting handbook, but somehow just when you need it, it'll tell you something like how to pick a lock.

Even though it was written by a guy named Irving Posner in Pittsburgh in 1926 or whatever.

What I came to see I was writing about, which is something that's of great concern to me as a parent, is what I see as the lost adventure of childhood. I remember a childhood that was the kind of childhood that people had been having in the United States going back at least four or five generations before me. It was rooted in independence and freedom. I'd just go out in the morning on Saturday morning and say "Bye, Mom" and I'd be gone all day long.

She wouldn't know where you were.

She would not have the faintest idea where I was, and I'd come home for dinner. And I'd get into a lot of trouble, no doubt about it, and probably almost died a couple of times, but still that's the world. It dovetailed so completely with what I read, so when I went out to play I could go play in Narnia or I could go play in the Virginia wilderness of George Washington's boyhood if I was reading a biography of George Washington. There was a seamlessness between the world of literature and fantasy and the world that I was living and playing in. That really mirrored what was going on in the fantasy worlds themselves, where there was a seamlessness and a porousness between, say, England and Narnia.

Or even something like Tom Sawyer. Even though I wasn't a boy, there was a Tom Sawyer element to my childhood. Our mother didn't know where we were half the time and there was so much more undeveloped land to play on.

There was more undeveloped land and so much more free space. And now so much of the space we put our children into is created by adults for children. It's licensed by adults, patrolled and permitted by adults. There's nowhere for them to disappear into. They're under surveillance all the time. It's that idea of that lost ... that's the Summerlands, to me, ultimately. That this is imperiled, or probably gone forever, is a very painful idea to me. Maybe that ties into the idea of a lost innocence or a lost boyhood.

In a way it's not a lost innocence, though, because now children live in this artificially maintained innocence, the place where everything is safe.

It's lost experience, I guess. On the other hand there's all this pressure on them to grow up too quickly. A lot of homework. You don't get to be a kid in the way that you once were automatically granted the right to be a kid. It's a painful thing.

Why did you set "Summerland" in the Pacific Northwest?

I lived on an island there and for one year I was the scorekeeper for a Little League baseball team. I had never played Little League baseball, since my father wisely sought to protect me from my own failings. He didn't even let me get near a bat, basically, because he was afraid of the consequences. So that was my exposure to the world of Little League. I got to see it both from the bench, 'cause I would sit on the bench with the kids, and also from the adult, parental point of view. I got to see what the parents were like. I got to see how the more talented kids treated the less talented kids. So when I was writing this it just seemed inevitable that I'd set it there on an island.

The Pacific Northwest is also a place where a sense of wildness still persists.

And the kids are allowed more freedom, as I think is still true for kids in rural settings. They're granted more freedom than kids in urban or suburban settings. It's true, I needed that. If I'd tried to set this in Berkeley, Calif. [where Chabon lives] it would have been a lot harder. Jennifer T. and Ethan would have been scheduling play dates with each other. It gave me the liberty to create the same kind of adventure that I grew up reading, which felt so much a part of my own experience then but I fear that for a lot of kids might feel somewhat remote.

You're also writing screenplays, which is something that I think of as a job that novelists take on when they need to make some money. But you seem to be doing it out of choice.

Well, not entirely. I insure my family's health through the Screenwriter's Guild and you have to make a minimum amount every year as a screenwriter to keep your insurance up. I mostly do it for the insurance, actually. But this most recent one -- I just got offered the chance to do "Spiderman II," or to take a whack at it, I should say. I could have passed it up because I just finished the "Kavalier and Clay" screenplay, but I just couldn't resist.

So you really wanted to do it?

It was just too good of an offer. I love Spider-Man. I grew up loving Spider-Man. I love Peter Parker, he's a great character. Of all the things in that first film, what I liked best was the Peter Parker stuff. I thought Tobey Maguire was great, and the parts that had to do with this ordinary guy having to come to terms with having these amazing abilities. And even the freakishness about it. There were only hints of that in the first film but there was a freakish, almost Peter Lorre aspect to it, where those things are growing out of his skin. So how could I say no?

• View blog reactions